ABSTRACT
Clearly Morgan’s canon was intended to be a stricture to guide the interpretation of evidence pertaining to psychological processes in ani mals, but the misrepresentation of the canon that occurred early (e.g., Mills, 1899, p. 271; Washburn, 1908, pp. 24-25) and that contin ues in the present (e.g., Baenninger, 1994) is that it was a canon of parsimony or simplicity. In turn, parsimony became equated with “Ockham’s razor” (e.g., Boring, 1929, 1950; Burns, 1915; Moody, 1967; Thornburn, 1915), which advocated choosing the explanation with the fewest assumptions.
